David Mead leaves despair of divorce behind on ‘Always’

David Mead does a free in-store performance at Grimey's on Tues., Aug. 25 in support of his new album, 'Almost and Always' (photo: Heidi Ross).

For all the artistic geniuses that work “in the moment,” sometimes it can be beneficial for a songwriter to tap on the brakes.

Nashville singer-songwriter David Mead learned this as he planned what he thought was going to be the follow-up to his 2006 album, Tangerine. He had very quickly cooked up a batch of “heavy” songs revolving around the pain and friction of his recent divorce.

“They felt really important to me at the time,” he says, “but the part of the process of a divorce I was going through, it was kind of the part that’s the equivalent of your buddy coming over right when it’s happened, and all he can do is bitch and moan and cry and snot about it. (Those songs) were kind of the aural equivalent of that.

“I was very wisely advised by Brad Jones, the producer. . . . He very gently said, ‘I know these songs mean a lot to you, but you’re probably asking a lot of the listener to sit through 40 minutes of it.’ At first, that hurt my feelings, but then I realized about a month later that he was very correct.”

The new album that replaced that set of songs, Almost and Always (out Aug. 25), is still “a canonization of divorce,” Mead says, but “heavy” might well be the last word you’d use to describe it.

‘They felt fresh’

On Almost, Mead’s sleepy but compelling croon leads listeners through a collage of styles inspired by some of the oldest forms of “contemporary” music. You hear bits of folk balladry, Burt Bacharach, classic crooner records, jazz and Latin pop mingling through the rainy-day proceedings.

Credit for Almost’s melancholy charm is due in part to collaborator Bill DeMain of Nashville classic-pop savants Swan Dive, who co-wrote nine of the 13 songs and lent some skeletal lyrical skill to the tunes.

“It’s not overly dramatic or florid,” Mead says of DeMain’s input. “It’s never too introspective. It’s easier for me to latch onto his lyrics and write music for them than my own (lyrics) at this point.”

“We had some troubled times together,” Mead sings on album opener “Rainy Weather Friend.” “Maybe someday we will again/ You know the blues can’t last forever/ So long, my rainy weather friend.”

For an album born out of divorce, Almost is fueled by a stunning calm and clarity. It likely helped that when Mead and DeMain first started writing songs together in 2007, Mead wasn’t intending to keep them for himself.

“It’s kind of strange to think about now, since they’re all on my album, but initially, we couldn’t picture anyone singing them other than like a Bette Midler (type),” Mead says.

“That was always the kind of person we had in mind when we would write. We looked for her for a while. I had been doing the vocals on the demos, and after (the original new album) got discarded, I kind of came back to them and said, ‘This is basically what I wanted (the album) to be about anyway.’ ”

Mead says the album still feels “really personal” and has given him a level-headed form of emotional release.

“I think, in some ways, it’s easier to accurately express an emotion when you have a little bit of distance. The fact that a lot of these songs were originally written for someone else allowed me to go back to them through the back door and re-inhabit them. They felt fresh. They didn’t feel so intrinsically attached to my particular experience.

“I would like to think that in turn, that makes it easier for other people to experience them and apply them to their own lives,” he continues. “Which is much more important to me than someone listening to 40 minutes of my grief.”